This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: A frothy matter — A report called “Beer foam is a carrier of aroma” may be the crushing blow beer foam aroma sceptics – if there are any – feared…. Hierarchy of dog needs — … Maslow’s […]
Arnd Leike of the University of Munich was awarded the 2002 Ig Noble Physics prize for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay. [Reference “Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth,” Arnd Leike, European Journal of Physics, vol. 23, January 2002, pp. 21-26.] Since then, investigations into the decay […]
Two scientists in Japan studied how the foam on a fresh cup of espresso makes that drink so thermodynamically delicious. My “Improbable Research” column on the RealClearLife web site gives details. It begins: What’s not so hot about hot coffee —no matter how much you love it — is how quickly it cools. Two Japanese scientists noticed […]
The research on why foamy liquid (such as beer or latte) is less likely to slosh out of a cup than non-foamy liquid (such as black coffee), has now been formally published. The study is: “Damping of liquid sloshing by foams,” A. Sauret, F. Boulogne, J. Cappello, Emilie Dressaire [pictured here] and H.A. Stone, Physics of […]
“Gushing is the vigorous overfoaming of carbonated beverages when the bottle is opened.” Don’t you just hate it when that happens? But (other than too much priming sugar as in the example above) why does it happen, and what can be done about it? Answers can be found in a 2014 paper in the Journal […]
Hard and soft on the heels of the announcement about beer foam’s anti-spillage property comes other news about beer foam research: “Physics of Beer Tapping,” Javier Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Almudena Casado-Chacón, and Daniel Fuster, Physical Review Letters, 113, 214501, 20 November 2014. The authors report: “The popular bar prank known in colloquial English as beer tapping consists in […]
Beer foam, as a subject of experimental inquiry, will be on tap at a physics meeting next week: Abstract: H16.00009: “Damping of liquid sloshing by foams: from everyday observations to liquid transport“ 67th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, Sunday–Tuesday, November 23–25, 2014; San Francisco, California, Session H16: Free-Surface Flows V: General, […]
Investigator Heidi Toms read about the medical report about the hazard of having one’s pants filled with foam. Toms cautions us that foam in the pants can sometimes, at least in theory, be a good thing, provided there is not a dangerous oversufficiency of foam. She alerts us to the foam-in-pants usage described in US […]
Pants must not be filled with foam, lest bad things happen. That is a possible lesson one could draw from this monograph: “A Sticky Situation…”, J. Hardwicke, S. Azad, and J.K.G. Laitung, Injury Extra, vol. 37, 2006, pp. 34–5. The authors at Royal Preston Hospital, Preston, UK, report [AIR 16:2]: A 25-year-old man was admitted […]